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Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week

1630 points dang | 4 comments | 05 Dec 16 19:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we're going to try something new and have a cleanse. Starting today, it's Political Detox Week on HN.

For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens.

Why? Political conflicts cause harm here. The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control. Our values are fragile—they're like plants that get forgotten, then trampled and scorched in combat. HN is a garden, politics is war by other means, and war and gardening don't mix.

Worse, these harsher patterns can spread through the rest of the culture, threatening the community as a whole. A detox week seems like a good way to strengthen the immune system and to see how HN functions under altered conditions.

Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time.

A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.

Have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we'll try to allay them. This really is an experiment; we don't have an opinion yet about longer-term changes. Our hope is that we can learn together by watching what happens when we try something new.

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tarikjn ◴[05 Dec 16 19:44 UTC] No.13108655[source]▶
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).

The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing.

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davidw ◴[05 Dec 16 19:55 UTC] No.13108789[source]▶
> head in the sand

There are a ton of other sites where you can follow and debate politics all you want.

I'm starting to stick my nose into local politics here in Bend, Oregon, but there's no reason I need to talk about it on HN. I'm ok with compartmentalizing things: HN for tech/startups/'interesting things', and other sites for other things. I love bike racing, too, and feel that it's the best sport in the world, but I see no need to introduce bike racing articles here.

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fnovd ◴[05 Dec 16 20:19 UTC] No.13109041[source]▶
>There are a ton of other sites where you can follow and debate politics all you want.

But where do you draw the line of what is 'politics' and what is 'cool nerdy tech stuff'?

Is a breakdown of 538's method of poll aggregation too politically charged, even if there's a perfectly good overlap of math and statistics?

If Trump makes an out-of-left-field statement about repatriating corporate money, are we prohibited from talking about how it will affect Apple?

A blanket ban of 'political threads and topics' seem harsh, even if just for a week. I personally haven't found the political content on this site to be out of bounds, considering the monumental political upheavals we've been witnessing over the past year.

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joggery ◴[05 Dec 16 20:26 UTC] No.13109111[source]▶
Politics is about who to blame and hacking is about solving problems. (Blaming is the opposite of solving problems.)
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1. icebraining ◴[05 Dec 16 20:56 UTC] No.13109466[source]▶
That reductionist view of politics is part of the problem. Politics is the process of making decisions applying to all members of each group. It's essential and a part of what makes us human.
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2. trav4225 ◴[05 Dec 16 23:19 UTC] No.13110813[source]▶
In modern vernacular it seems that that sense might be better expressed as "policy", rather than "politics".
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3. icebraining ◴[05 Dec 16 23:31 UTC] No.13110896[source]▶
Politics is the process to decide upon the policy.
4. joggery ◴[06 Dec 16 09:32 UTC] No.13113365[source]▶
Consider that the machinery to make group decisions and allocate resources already exists (laws, institutions, government, etc). It is imperfect and can be improved. But what is relevant here is that groups of people wish to alter the machinery in certain fixed (uncreative) ways. The unconscious motive is that of preserving their own identities.

An extreme case would be a Dr Evil figure who will not examine his own heart and needs the world to burn just so he can pretend to himself that he's a good person. So he makes the world burn. At every stage convinced of his own righteousness.

This explains why 'war is the continuation of politics by other means'. What passes for peace is trench warfare where the only progress is sideways. Improving the machinery may be desirable but in practice politics is dominated by preventing inevitable perturbations from escalating into open hatred and violence.

(More parochially one can tell when politics is influencing the discussion because there is always blaming going on.)